A Dormant Black Hole has Been Discovered Just Outside the Milky Way - by spacewriter
It’s not for lack of looking, and astronomers have searched. “It is incredible that we hardly know of any dormant black holes, given how common astronomers believe them to be”, said team member Pablo Marchant of KU Leuven.
This artist’s impression shows what the binary system VFTS 243 might look like if we were observing it up close. The sizes of the two binary components are not to scale: in reality, the blue star is about 200 000 times larger than the black hole. Note that the ‘lensing’ effect around the so-called “dormant” black hole is shown for illustration purposes only, to make this dark object more noticeable in the image.
To find VFTS 243, the collaboration used observations of nearly a thousand massive stars in the Tarantula Nebula. The data came from theand team members used it to identify stars that might have black holes as companions. Because alternative explanations exist for such objects, identifying these companions as dormant black holes is extremely difficult.
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